DESCRIPTION: (applicant's abstract). Specific sensory-cognitive functions-- phoneme segmentation, symbol imagery, and concept imagery-- must be intact for reading fluency and comprehension. However, a lack of comprehensive assessments in sensory-cognitive areas may allow erroneous assumptions that maturation will bestow reading ability or that instruction in any one skill area will solve reading deficiency. These assumptions are contributing to our national crisis in literacy and language processing for both business and education. This Phase I project will develop an assessment battery, the Lindamood-Bell Sensory-Cognitive Inventory, for assessing the sensory-cognitive components of literacy in both computer-administered and print formats. The project will examine the validity and relationship between these sensory-cognitive assessments and standardized literacy skill assessments. Phase II will expand the sensory-cognitive battery to include computerized skills assessments in oral vocabulary, word attack, word identification, and passage decoding with a national demographic study of subjects, ages 8 through 22. The completed project will provide data on the sensory-cognitive/skills relationships and enable publication of multimedia assessment instruments to serve diagnostic needs not currently met in education. Such instruments will permit the determination of instructional sensory- cognitive intervention to develop reading comprehension and decoding fluency for learners. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: NOT AVAILABLE